Convinced she could provide her children with all their educational needs, Evelyn Reyes of New Port Richey, Florida, began homeschooling her children eight years ago and realized she could combine education time with family time. PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

Editor’s note: This commentary was written expressly for redefinED by Matthew H. Lee, a graduate student in education policy at the University of Arkansas; Angela R. Watson, senior research fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy; and redefinED guest blogger Patrick J. Wolf, distinguished professor of education policy and endowed chair at the University of Arkansas.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” — C.S. Lewis

What prompted Cevin Soling, Freedman-Martin fellow in journalism at Harvard’s Kennedy School, to choose this warning as he introduced an event at Harvard earlier this month?

Her proposed ban puts parents “ideologically committed to isolating their children” on trial and assumes their guilt for denying “their children any meaningful education” and subjecting their children to “terrifying physical and emotional abuse.” It shifts the burden of proof to the accused to “demonstrate they would provide a significantly superior education.”

What happened to a presumption of innocence before the law?

Far from Bartholet’s accusations, homeschooling is not a small, monolithic practice dominated “overwhelmingly” by conservative Christians. At any given time, homeschoolers make up roughly 3 percent of the school-age population, and one study published in the Peabody Journal of Education estimates that as many as 10 percent of all American students are homeschooled at some point during their academic careers.

Meanwhile, National Center for Education Statistics data show that homeschool respondents are more concerned with the “environment of other schools” and “academic instruction” than they “desire to provide religious instruction.”

A presumptive ban against homeschooling denies at least two rights. First, it denies parents the right to govern the education of their child, proclaimed by the US Supreme Court to be their fundamental right in 1923 (Meyer v. Nebraska), 1925 (Pierce v. Society of Sisters), and 2000 (Troxel v. Granville). Second, by giving public officials the authority to conduct home visitations in homeschooling households and to forcibly enroll children in public schools against their parents’ wishes, it denies both parents and children the right to be secure in their persons and homes against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Let’s shift the burden of proof back to homeschooling’s accusers. Can they prove that public schooling delivers better academic results, strengthens democratic values and provides a surer guarantee against abuse than homeschooling?

Homeschooled children demonstrate academic outcomes equal to or better than their public-school counterparts. While we don’t know about academic outcomes for all homeschooled students, a 2010 report by Brian Ray finds that homeschoolers on average score between 15 to 30 percentage points above the national average. As for those who pursue a college education, a review by Gene Gloeckner and Paul Jones indicates that when differences are detected, homeschooled students have higher standardized test scores and college GPAs relative to their public school peers.

Homeschoolers also compare favorably to publicly schooled students on civic and democratic values. Research by Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas finds homeschooling is associated with more political tolerance relative to public schooling. Indiana University’s Robert Kunzman reports a similar advantage in his 2009 book, “Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling.”

In delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court in the 1925 case Pierce v. Society of Sisters, Justice James McReynolds wrote, “The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” Homeschooling may be the purest expression of families exercising this right and rising up to meet this high duty.

As courts have ruled repeatedly, when homeschooling is put on trial and given due process, a fair reading of the evidence gives us no choice but to emphatically declare, “Not guilty!”

K-12 choice programs began as a proposal by a Nobel Prize-winning economist to improve K-12 outcomes. Could other mechanisms devised by economists in other policy areas, such as cap-and-trade policies to reduce air pollution, also improve K-12 outcomes?

The answer might be yes in theory, but in practice, probably not.

In a cap-and-trade system designed to reduce pollution, the government sets an emissions cap and issues a quantity of emission allowances consistent with that cap. Emitters must hold allowances for every ton of greenhouse gas they emit. Companies may buy and sell allowances, and this market establishes an emissions price. Companies that can reduce their emissions at a lower cost may sell any excess allowances for companies facing higher costs to buy.

Under a cap-and-trade regime, firms get an allowance for the amount of pollution they can emit, and when they reduce their pollution above and beyond their goal, they benefit by being able to sell some of their “pollution allowance.” This creates a financial incentive for all firms to reduce pollution. Those who exceed their goals receive payments; those who do not reduce pollution must either get used to paying other firms or figure out a way to their own pollution down.

Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology notes in his book More From Lessthat cap and trade has been a huge success. While it takes some time to wrap one’s head around the idea of allowing companies to sell the right to pollute the atmosphere (a notion that one’s instinct naturally seeks to reject), cap and trade has been enormously more successful at reducing pollution than clumsy top-down fiats.

A cap-and-trade mechanism can create an incentive for all polluters to become innovators and to seek the lowest cost methods for reducing as much pollution as possible. McAffee reports a 2009 Smithsonian summary that found a cap-and-trade program cost only a fraction of an initial estimate ($3 billion instead of $25 billion) and generated an estimated $122 billion in health and environmental benefits. If one assumes the actual benefits were only half that amount, it still represents an impressive 20 to 1 return on investment.

Cap and trade in effect creates a quasi-market for pollution reduction. Could state lawmakers create such a scheme to reduce, say, early childhood illiteracy?

The technical challenges would be considerable, perhaps insurmountable. Cap-and-trade schemes must lay out their scope (what exactly is to be reduced), create an overall target for reduction, figure out the gritty details of exchange and ensure market integrity. The details matter in each case: How do you set the cap, how do you measure, over what period do you measure?

We will lay out a theoretical example in which Florida lawmakers set a cap for third-grade illiteracy below.

Market integrity would represent a large challenge. The incentive to pretend to reduce pollution under a cap-and-trade scheme is even stronger than the incentive to reduce pollution if firms can get away with it. If the goal were to reduce illiteracy, something much more credible and secure than a set of self-administered exams would be entirely necessary. Let us assume a set of third-party administered exams like the SAT and ACT could be worked out.

In 1998, 48 percent of Florida fourth graders scored “Below Basic” on the NAEP fourth-grade reading test. On the most recent exam, 30 percent scored “Below Basic.” That is an impressive reduction compared to other states, but it will not be hitting single digits anytime soon.

If market integrity could be assured, the state could set a fourth-grade illiteracy cap of 25 percent and make assignments to either schools or LEAs consistent with that goal based upon their previous performance and let the educators figure out how to get it done. Those who succeed in exceeding their target would be rewarded. Those failing to meet their cap would need to buy credits with their set-aside funds from schools or LEAs that exceeded their credits.

How would they do it?

If the cap-and-trade market were established, we cannot know in advance what methods might arise to reduce illiteracy. Some might make much greater use of Reading Scholarship Accounts, others virtual education, but there is just no telling what Florida educators might come up with.

Should we give it a try?

No, I do not think so. While cap and trade is a fascinating institution to harness market forces for social goals, education policy is fashioned democratically rather than technocratically. Given the delicacy of a whole series of decision points under cap and trade, it is hard to imagine that opponents of the policy would find easy work in fouling the gears even if it were in fact attempted. Unlike education choice policies, which develop a constituency, many of the families attending schools selling illiteracy credits in a cap-and-trade scheme would likely remain unaware of the fact. Meanwhile, schools lacking confidence in their ability to hit targets likely would quickly organize into a seek-and-destroy cap and trade faction.

The handful of districts that have attempted portfolio models struggle with similar challenges. While in theory any district in America could conduct a competition for the right to run their schools from groups of educators, few have done so in practice, and fewer still have persisted in it. It is not impossible, just very difficult politically.

K-12 cap and trade would be even more difficult. Education choice policies have the virtue of developing a supportive constituency to defend new freedom, which makes it the most politically plausible method for utilizing voluntary exchange and association to better serve public purposes.

Diffusion, then, rather than discovery, is the duty of our government. With us, the qualifications of voters are as important as the qualifications of governors, and even comes first in the natural order. -Horace Mann

Preparing students to responsibly exercise citizenship represented a foundational aspiration in the founding of the American public-school system. Then as now, we did not simply aspire to have schools equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary for economic flourishing; we also wanted students to develop a grounding in history and civics.

Our education system is failing to accomplish this goal.

Last week, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released nationwide eighth-grade data on the 2018 exams taken in United States History, Geography and Civics. Fewer than one-third of American public-school students scored proficient on any of the three exams. In fact, on each exam, the percentage of public-school students scoring “Below Basic” exceeded the percentage scoring “Proficient.”

For every eighth-grade public-school student who scored “Proficient,” there were more than 2.5 who scored “Below Basic,” the lowest achievement level. We can’t be sure what the ratio of “Proficient” to “Below Basic” would be among American eighth-graders if we abolished their history classes, gave them a library card and offered to pay them a dollar for every history book they read, but it might surpass 2.5 to 1.

While scores aren’t available for private schools in general, scores for Catholic school students are – and they tell a different story.

Scores of Catholic school students show an advantage, in several ways: when comparing them to free and reduced-price lunch-eligible public-school students; non-eligible free and reduced-price lunch populations; and racial and ethnic groups. If you compare Catholic school students of parents without college degrees to public-school students of parents without college degrees, Catholic school students get the better of it. The same holds true when you compare Catholic school students of college-educated parents to public-school students of college-educated parents.

“From the beginning of compulsory education in this country, we have thought of the government as having some right to educate children so that they become active, productive participants in the larger society,” she says. This involves in part giving children the knowledge to eventually get jobs and support themselves.

“But it’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints,” she says, noting that European countries such as Germany ban homeschooling entirely and that countries such as France require home visits and annual tests.

People can have honest disagreements about home-school policy, but I invite the reader to ponder the first chart in this post and attempt to square it with the quote above. Should we be worried about the civic values and knowledge of the 3 percent of students who home-schooled before the pandemic? Or might the appalling lack of history, geography and civics displayed by the 87 percent or so students attending public schools constitute a more pressing concern?

You, dear reader, look as though you could use some distraction from the viral apocalypse. Like many good stories, this one flashes back to the past to inform the present.

A decade ago, while an analyst at the Goldwater Institute, I participated in a debate concerning choice versus curriculum reform. Yes, people were confused about whether those things were mutually exclusive a decade ago, as they are today. (Spoiler alert: choice helps curriculum reform).

In any case, the debate prompted me to ask myself which states had done a lot of both choice and testing accountability. This in turn led me to look closely at the NAEP scores of Florida and to consider that former Gov. Jeb Bush had aggressively sought to improve literacy instruction by creating a variety of public and private choice mechanisms.

Staring at fourth-grade NAEP scores by race/ethnicity on my computer screen, here is what I discovered.

The conversation around K-12 in Arizona at the time frequently involved an “if you control for student demographics, we are kind of average” story. This was part of a fable with a thousand faces; you will hear different versions of it in different states. In Arizona, the story involved kids immigrating from Mexico who were unable to read Spanish. In Minnesota, I’ve heard tales told in hushed voices about Hmong kids. In more than one southern state, I’ve heard allusions to scores of white kids scoring quite high when they weren’t anything of the sort. The details vary, but the moral is always the same: “We here in state X, we’ve got the really hard-to-educate kids.”

The fact that Florida’s Hispanic students were reading approximately a grade level higher than the average for all students in Arizona required the development of a new rationale. That new rationale was the magic Cuban theory. Florida’s Hispanics are Cubans, the story went, and they are wealthy. “Obviously we can’t expect to do that with our Hispanic students,” the theory concluded.

I related the magic Cuban theory to an audience at the first ExcelinEd conference held in Orlando. Given the advantage of local knowledge held by many audience members, the crowd laughed out loud at the absurdity of the stereotype. Despite living in a distant patch of cactus, I had spent enough time in the Florida Keys with my grandfather to develop a lifelong taste for ropas viejas and to know better.

The magic Cuban theory could never survive scrutiny. First off, Florida’s Hispanic community is vastly more diverse than appreciated by distant stereotypes, with Cubans constituting a minority among Hispanics. Second, Florida saw large increases in literacy among multiple ethnic groups. Magic Haitian theory anyone?

Finally, buried deep in the data explorer, NAEP has a variable that allows you to break down Hispanics by subgroup. NAEP, alas, discontinued this variable, but we do have it for both 1998 (the year before Jeb Bush took office) and 2002. It would have been great to have data from additional years, but note that the 2002 NAEP came before the adoption of the third-grade retention policy. Between 1998 and 2002, Florida policymakers had adopted major education reforms, but not all the reforms.

Here is what the gains looked like during the 1998 to 2002 period.

Florida’s Cuban-Americans scored well, but they were not driving gains. As a rough rule of thumb, 10 points on NAEP exams approximately equals an average grade level’s worth of progress. In other words, we would expect a group of fifth-graders given the fourth-grade test to do about 10 points better. The Mexican-American gains were very large, very meaningful and very statistically significant.

By the way, those eighth-graders from 2002 are approaching their mid-30s now. With all of today’s troubles, and considering those around the bend, Florida chose wisely in not succumbing to the soft bigotry of low expectations, instead making an all-out effort to teach literacy. Life is hard, but life is really hard if you can’t read.

Editor’s note: National Catholic Schools Week, celebrated nationwide since 1974, traditionally coincides with National School Choice Week. The theme – Catholic Schools: Learn. Serve. Succeed. – encompasses what Catholic school leaders consider the core products and values that can be found in Catholic schools across the country. James Herzog, associate director for education for the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, contributed today’s post in honor of this annual event.

There’s excitement in the air for Catholic schools this week.

Across the nation, colorful signs and banners announcing the 46th annual National Catholic Schools Week are proudly displayed. Alumni are returning to their roots with gratitude to share with today’s Catholic schoolchildren their career journeys and life lessons. Activities including community service days, open houses and Masses are being held, all celebrating the academic, spiritual and financial benefits our society reaps from Catholic schools.

In Florida, we’re celebrating 244 Catholic schools that serve more than 85,000 students from Pre-K to 12th grade. Enrollment across the Archdiocese of Miami and the state’s seven dioceses – St. Augustine, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Pensacola/Tallahassee, Palm Beach and Venice – totals 85,416 for the 2019-20 academic year. Enrollment in Florida Catholic schools has held steady around 85,000 for the past decade, despite a plethora of other education choice options, and in the face of declining enrollment in other states.

An additional cause for celebration is Florida’s leading role in creating robust school choice scholarships for children from lower-income families and for those with unique abilities. A total of 25,300 Catholic school students rely on either a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, a Family Empowerment Scholarship, a Gardiner Scholarship or a McKay Scholarship. Many of these children would not otherwise be able to attend a Catholic school.

But an overwhelming reason for our joy as we celebrate this very special week is the academic success of our students. Ninety-nine percent of students who attend Catholic high schools graduate; of that percent, 86 percent attend four-year colleges, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. The NCEA further reports that the student achievement gap is narrower in Catholic schools than public schools.

Even more remarkable, latest National Assessment of Education Progress scores show that Catholic school students outperformed their public school peers in the percent considered proficient in fourth-grade and eighth-grade reading and math. Thirty-five percent of Catholic school fourth-graders were proficient in reading compared with 26 percent of public school students, while 39 percent were proficient in math compared with 32 percent in public school. Forty-three percent of Catholic school eighth-graders were proficient in reading compared with 9 percent of public school students, while 31 percent were proficient in math compared with 23 percent in public school.

So the buzz about National Catholic Schools Week is more than just hype. It’s supported by demonstrable academic achievement as well as very tangible contributions to our communities and our nation.

A recent comparison of K-12 children around the U.S. brought bad news for education reformers—an amorphous group of policymakers and advocates who are akin to locksmiths searching for the right combination of resources and policy ideas to unlock student potential. The news was bad for students, too, but since the scores do not affect a student’s report card, the results mattered more to the aforementioned locksmiths today.

The results will matter for students tomorrow.

As readers of this blog will know, the Nation’s Report Card, also known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), is a set of math and reading tests given to a sample of fourth- and eighth-graders around the country every two years. The U.S. Department of Education also administers NAEP tests in other subjects and specific cities.

The more frequent math and reading results allow education locksmiths to gauge whether any number of inputs in the nation’s schools—from spending increases to new laws—are having their desired effects. With both more money and federal law firmly in place, observers were frustrated that national averages for 2019 reading and math scores fell from 2017 (with the 1-point improvement in fourth-grade math a small exception).

Rigorous research is required to appropriately link policies and school budgets to NAEP outcomes, but Florida’s aggressive upgrade to its K-12 education design in the early 2000s tracked closely with improved NAEP scores among minority students. The additional parent options in education, along with a focus on reading among third-graders and more attention to the use of Advanced Placement testing has been the subject of policy discussion around the country since.

This year, reformers pointed to similar reading-related policies in Mississippi to explain the state’s improvement in fourth-grade scores, while calling for “urgent action” elsewhere. The Council of Chief State School Officers even said the “urgency of improving outcomes for all students” was enough to plan … a meeting. This “urgent action” is why the results will matter for students tomorrow: That is when the changes will affect the classroom. Parents can only hope it is not too late by then.

Nationally, average scores among fourth- and eighth-grade students increased in math by 27 points and 20 points, respectively, between 1990 and 2009. Yet since 2009, and a decade is almost the length of a child’s K-12 career, the improvement stalled. Reading scores have improved by just three points in both grades since 1992.

It is these scores and other comparisons that have not changed that should bother reformers and policymakers alike in 2019. Last summer, Harvard University’s Paul Peterson wrote in Education Next that the test score gap on NAEP and international tests between students from low-income families and their more affluent peers has not changed since the 1960s. Peterson wrote later that the “performances on math, reading, and science tests of the most advantaged and the most disadvantaged students differ by approximately four years’ worth of learning, a disparity that has remained essentially unchanged for nearly half a century.”

Such findings temper enthusiasm for any year-to-year increases. So, too, do the results from NAEP’s other test, the Long-Term Trend Assessment (LTT). Average scores for 17-year-olds in math and reading have not changed since the 1970s (the LTT was last given in 2012 and is scheduled to resume in 2020). Students appear to lose any gains made in elementary and middle school by graduation.

Over time, these results have been depressingly more of the same, which should incentivize education reformers and policymakers not to do the same things. Such as: In the last two years, many state policymakers were either absent or complicit in teacher union attempts to keep students in assigned district schools by curbing charter school growth in Los Angeles and Chicago and blocking new private learning options in Kentucky and West Virginia.

These options are the most significant departures from the routine of school-by-zip-code because parents can help a struggling child immediately by moving them to a new setting with a charter school, private school scholarship or education savings account. Students will not have to wait for the urgent meetings to finish, hoping to find success this time.

The aughts were a time of K-12 academic improvement. For some states, including Florida, that improvement started earlier, but included the era illustrated in this chart.

All states began participating in NAEP exams in 2003. Most states experienced a pronounced improvement in eighth-grade reading and eighth-grade math from 2003 to 2009. On these tests, 10 points equals approximately one grade level’s worth of average progress.

As you can see, there are far more bars going in a positive direction in the first chart and relatively few going in a negative direction between 2003 and 2009. Now let’s examine the same sort of chart between 2009 and 2019.

Things went badly after 2009 in most states. Some broad theories readily come to mind but are weaker than they might seem.

Most states adopted the Common Core standards after 2009, for instance. Prominent analysts of the center right and left have studied the impact of Common Core on academic achievement and have reached a common conclusion: not much positive or negative impact. Look at Texas on both charts; positive experience in 2003 to 2009, deeply negative experience from 2009 to 2019. Texas never adopted Common Core.

Obviously, lots of states that did adopt also had bad decades, but Mississippi had the biggest 2009 to 2019 gains. Judged against lofty promises of improvement, the Common Core project clearly fell flat at a high cost in terms of political and financial capital. That is very different than saying they worsened outcomes, but it’s still very bad.

The Texas economy got off light in the Great Recession and boomed economically for much of the 2009 to 2019 period, but Texas scores worsened statewide. The so-called “Sand States” – Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada – were the hardest hit in the housing downturn, but they all had a much better decade driving academic improvement than Texas.

Per-pupil spending has been increasing since fourth-graders of 2019 took the NAEP, and for most of the time eighth-graders have been in school. We should hope that Mike is wrong about this given that the country is overdue for a recession by historical standards.

Before President Obama took office, I had feared states might simply drop their passing thresholds if the federal government stuck to its guns. Moreover, the Common Core project coupled with teacher evaluation can be seen as a doubling down on high-stakes testing strategies, one that radicalized opponents countered in a variety of (largely predictable) ways.

So, what to make of all of this?

Providing academic transparency to parents, taxpayers and policymakers remains vital, but it’s clear the public is not on board for heavy-handed, top-down testing mandates. We live in a democracy, and the demos is not enamored with the idea of closing schools based on test scores and firing teachers based on test scores, and are sick of the amount of test prep going on in school these days. If you doubt any of that, feel free to focus-group it, or alternatively go outside and talk to normal people.

In many states, much of the low-hanging academic improvement fruit of the NCLB era has been reversed post 2009. Sun Tzu wrote that “a victorious general wins and then seeks battle whereas a defeated army seeks battle and then seeks victory.” It’s clear which of these two profiles education reformers more closely resemble today.

A good first step to recovery would be to focus on policies that have the prospect of developing supportive constituencies rather than annoying the public. Those who adhere to the status quo have the upper hand in most states even without antagonizing the public.

Year-to-year student achievement will always fluctuate, but how does Florida stand in the larger picture? While results from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress should concern everyone involved with K-12 education, Florida’s long-term trend is holding despite the recent score stagnation. And as we reported last week, Florida maintained high rankings when adjusting for demographics.

Among eighth-grade math students, Florida has improved 24 points compared to the national average of 19. Black students are up 28 points compared to 23 points nationally, and Hispanic students are up 30 points compared to 22 points nationally.

Eighth-grade reading, typically a sore spot for Florida given the tremendous success in the early years, is up 8 points compared to 21 years ago. But the situation is much worse for the national average, where there has been no improvement on eighth-grade reading scores since 1998.

Black eighth-graders in Florida, despite being down from last year, still have improved by 8 points since 1998. The average black student nationally has seen no improvement since 1998.

Hispanic students fare better on English reading, up 12 points in Florida and 9 points nationally since 1998.